ITALY: Eight people died yesterday in a hail of automatic gunfire in the normally tranquil Piedmont village of Chieri, close to Turin, when a heavily armed man burst into the home of his ex-wife and went on the rampage.
It was shortly before nine in the morning when 40-year-old Mauro Antonello, armed with two semi-automatic pistols, a sub-machine gun and a revolver, burst in upon his ex-wife's family. According to neighbours, Antonello immediately confronted his ex-wife, Carlo Bergamin, starting a furious argument that soon spilled over into violence.
In quick succession, Antonello not only killed his ex-wife, but also her mother, Teresa, her brother Sergio, her sister-in-law Margherita as well as two neighbours, pensioners Decio and Laura Guerra, who had tried to intervene when they heard the argument.
Antonello also killed a seventh person, Pierangela Gramaglia (41), who appears to have worked in the small textile business that the Bergamin family ran out of an office, adjacent to their home.
The bodies of the victims were found in the homes of both the Bergamin and Guerra families as well as in the communal garden in front of their semi-detached villas.Having killed all seven people who came across his path, Mauro Antonello walked back into the Bergamin home and climbed upstairs to the loft flat. There he sat down on a sofa and killed himself with a single shot to the head.
Unemployed Antonello, who formerly ran his own building business and who worked occasionally as a security guard, had separated from Carla Bergamin two years ago after an unhappy marriage described yesterday by neighbours as "tempestuous" and "violent". The couple have an eight-year-old daughter who narrowly escaped yesterday's bloodbath having taken the school bus to school just minutes before her father arrived.
Chieri is such a normally quiet, rural village that when neighbours heard the first shots, they imagined that someone was either out hunting or trying to scare away some pigeons.
Police Colonel Nicola Paratore told reporters yesterday that Antonello's firearms were all legally held under up to date licenses since not only did he work as a part-time security guard but he was also an arms collector. Although Antonello did not have a criminal record, he was known to police because he had been accused of stalking his ex-wife.
The Chieri killings rounded off a dramatic and grisly 24 hours in Italy which saw 12 people killed in a series of family feuds.
On Monday, 58-year-old ex-Guardia di Finanza Colonel, Renzo Finamore, shot his wife, 53-year-old Alberta, his 17-year-old daughter Valentina and her boyfriend, 23-year-old Fabrizio Naitana prior to shooting himself as a result of an argument possibly linked to the sale of the family villa in Borzano di Albinea, 15 kilometres from Reggio Emilia in central Italy.
Both Alberta and Valentina Finamore were killed instantly whilst Fabrizio Naitana and Colonel Finamore were both seriously injured, with their condition yesterday being described as "desperate" by relatives.
In a separate incident, the bodies of a couple, 51-year-old Antonio Schilirò and 49-year-old Daniela Nunzi, were found in their apartment in the popular, Roman residential suburb of Casilino yesterday morning. Both bodies bore the signs of fatal knife wounds and investigators believe that Schilirò, an ex-army Colonel, first killed his wife and then himself as a result of a bitter row about his wife's drug-addicted son.